For some time, I have been telling everyone I am “healed” because I re-read Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and found it “fine.” In the cannon of yearning, Bluets is a gut wrenching ode to longing. It devastated me the first time I read it. Recently, I handed a copy to someone I am kissing in a bookstore and opened it to the very last page. I proceeded to look them dead in the eyes as I recited the entire last page by memory. I would not say this is very “healed” behavior but they seemed to enjoy the performance and who am I to turn down a canonical bit. Sometimes the book makes me unravel and other times I feel almost nothing at all. In any case, the last page has always felt like an anchoring psalm.
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I think we can all agree that on the spectrum of longing to light I fall somewhere on the left side of the pendulum. But I am a student nonetheless and would argue that the mere definition of student implies a lack of mastery. Anyway, what I really am trying to say is there was a time when I would rather have had this SS 1999 MIU MIU vest than any of these words and that time is still actually right now.